In the Days of the Comet (11 page)

But we in England saw all these things, or did not see them,
through the mirage of the New Paper, in a light of mania. All my
adolescence from fourteen to seventeen went to the music of that
monstrous resonating futility, the cheering, the anxieties, the
songs and the waving of flags, the wrongs of generous Buller and
the glorious heroism of De Wet—who ALWAYS got away; that was the
great point about the heroic De Wet—and it never occurred to us
that the total population we fought against was less than half the
number of those who lived cramped ignoble lives within the compass
of the Four Towns.

But before and after that stupid conflict of stupidities, a greater
antagonism was coming into being, was slowly and quietly defining
itself as a thing inevitable, sinking now a little out of attention
only to resume more emphatically, now flashing into some acute
definitive expression and now percolating and pervading some new
region of thought, and that was the antagonism of Germany and Great
Britain.

When I think of that growing proportion of readers who belong
entirely to the new order, who are growing up with only the vaguest
early memories of the old world, I find the greatest difficulty
in writing down the unintelligible confusions that were matter of
fact to their fathers.

Here were we British, forty-one millions of people, in a state of
almost indescribably aimless, economic, and moral muddle that we had
neither the courage, the energy, nor the intelligence to improve,
that most of us had hardly the courage to think about, and with our
affairs hopelessly entangled with the entirely different confusions
of three hundred and fifty million other persons scattered about
the globe, and here were the Germans over against us, fifty-six
millions, in a state of confusion no whit better than our own,
and the noisy little creatures who directed papers and wrote books
and gave lectures, and generally in that time of world-dementia
pretended to be the national mind, were busy in both countries,
with a sort of infernal unanimity, exhorting—and not only exhorting
but successfully persuading—the two peoples to divert such small
common store of material, moral and intellectual energy as either
possessed, into the purely destructive and wasteful business of war.
And—I have to tell you these things even if you do not believe
them, because they are vital to my story—there was not a man alive
who could have told you of any real permanent benefit, of anything
whatever to counterbalance the obvious waste and evil, that would
result from a war between England and Germany, whether England
shattered Germany or was smashed and overwhelmed, or whatever the
end might be.

The thing was, in fact, an enormous irrational obsession, it was,
in the microcosm of our nation, curiously parallel to the egotistical
wrath and jealousy that swayed my individual microcosm. It measured
the excess of common emotion over the common intelligence, the
legacy of inordinate passion we have received from the brute from
which we came. Just as I had become the slave of my own surprise and
anger and went hither and thither with a loaded revolver, seeking
and intending vague fluctuating crimes, so these two nations went
about the earth, hot eared and muddle headed, with loaded navies
and armies terribly ready at hand. Only there was not even a Nettie
to justify their stupidity. There was nothing but quiet imaginary
thwarting on either side.

And the press was the chief instrument that kept these two huge
multitudes of people directed against one another.

The press—those newspapers that are now so strange to us—like
the "Empires," the "Nations," the Trusts, and all the other great
monstrous shapes of that extraordinary time—was in the nature
of an unanticipated accident. It had happened, as weeds happen in
abandoned gardens, just as all our world has happened,—because
there was no clear Will in the world to bring about anything better.
Towards the end this "press" was almost entirely under the direction
of youngish men of that eager, rather unintelligent type, that
is never able to detect itself aimless, that pursues nothing with
incredible pride and zeal, and if you would really understand this
mad era the comet brought to an end, you must keep in mind that every
phase in the production of these queer old things was pervaded by
a strong aimless energy and happened in a concentrated rush.

Let me describe to you, very briefly, a newspaper day.

Figure first, then, a hastily erected and still more hastily
designed building in a dirty, paper-littered back street of old
London, and a number of shabbily dressed men coming and going in
this with projectile swiftness, and within this factory companies
of printers, tensely active with nimble fingers—they were always
speeding up the printers—ply their type-setting machines, and cast
and arrange masses of metal in a sort of kitchen inferno, above
which, in a beehive of little brightly lit rooms, disheveled men
sit and scribble. There is a throbbing of telephones and a clicking
of telegraph needles, a rushing of messengers, a running to and fro
of heated men, clutching proofs and copy. Then begins a clatter
roar of machinery catching the infection, going faster and faster,
and whizzing and banging,—engineers, who have never had time to
wash since their birth, flying about with oil-cans, while paper
runs off its rolls with a shudder of haste. The proprietor you
must suppose arriving explosively on a swift motor-car, leaping
out before the thing is at a standstill, with letters and documents
clutched in his hand, rushing in, resolute to "hustle," getting
wonderfully in everybody's way. At the sight of him even the messenger
boys who are waiting, get up and scamper to and fro. Sprinkle your
vision with collisions, curses, incoherencies. You imagine all the
parts of this complex lunatic machine working hysterically toward
a crescendo of haste and excitement as the night wears on. At last
the only things that seem to travel slowly in all those tearing
vibrating premises are the hands of the clock.

Slowly things draw on toward publication, the consummation of all
those stresses. Then in the small hours, into the now dark and
deserted streets comes a wild whirl of carts and men, the place
spurts paper at every door, bales, heaps, torrents of papers,
that are snatched and flung about in what looks like a free fight,
and off with a rush and clatter east, west, north, and south. The
interest passes outwardly; the men from the little rooms are going
homeward, the printers disperse yawning, the roaring presses slacken.
The paper exists. Distribution follows manufacture, and we follow
the bundles.

Our vision becomes a vision of dispersal. You see those bundles
hurling into stations, catching trains by a hair's breadth, speeding
on their way, breaking up, smaller bundles of them hurled with
a fierce accuracy out upon the platforms that rush by, and then
everywhere a division of these smaller bundles into still smaller
bundles, into dispersing parcels, into separate papers, and the
dawn happens unnoticed amidst a great running and shouting of boys,
a shoving through letter slots, openings of windows, spreading out
upon book-stalls. For the space of a few hours you must figure the
whole country dotted white with rustling papers—placards everywhere
vociferating the hurried lie for the day; men and women in trains,
men and women eating and reading, men by study-fenders, people
sitting up in bed, mothers and sons and daughters waiting for father
to finish—a million scattered people reading—reading headlong—or
feverishly ready to read. It is just as if some vehement jet
had sprayed that white foam of papers over the surface of the land. . .

And then you know, wonderfully gone—gone utterly, vanished as foam
might vanish upon the sand.

Nonsense! The whole affair a noisy paroxysm of nonsense, unreasonable
excitement, witless mischief, and waste of strength—signifying
nothing. . . .

And one of those white parcels was the paper I held in my hands,
as I sat with a bandaged foot on the steel fender in that dark
underground kitchen of my mother's, clean roused from my personal
troubles by the yelp of the headlines. She sat, sleeves tucked up
from her ropy arms, peeling potatoes as I read.

It was like one of a flood of disease germs that have invaded a
body, that paper. There I was, one corpuscle in the big amorphous
body of the English community, one of forty-one million such
corpuscles and, for all my preoccupations, these potent headlines,
this paper ferment, caught me and swung me about. And all over the
country that day, millions read as I read, and came round into line
with me, under the same magnetic spell, came round—how did we say
it?—Ah!—"to face the foe."

The comet had been driven into obscurity overleaf. The column
headed "Distinguished Scientist says Comet will Strike our Earth.
Does it Matter?" went unread. "Germany"—I usually figured this
mythical malignant creature as a corseted stiff-mustached Emperor
enhanced by heraldic black wings and a large sword—had insulted
our flag. That was the message of the New Paper, and the monster
towered over me, threatening fresh outrages, visibly spitting
upon my faultless country's colors. Somebody had hoisted a British
flag on the right bank of some tropical river I had never heard of
before, and a drunken German officer under ambiguous instructions
had torn it down. Then one of the convenient abundant natives
of the country, a British subject indisputably, had been shot in
the leg. But the facts were by no means clear. Nothing was clear
except that we were not going to stand any nonsense from Germany.
Whatever had or had not happened we meant to have an apology for,
and apparently they did not mean apologizing.

"HAS WAR COME AT LAST?"

That was the headline. One's heart leapt to assent. . . .

There were hours that day when I clean forgot Nettie, in dreaming
of battles and victories by land and sea, of shell fire, and
entrenchments, and the heaped slaughter of many thousands of men.

But the next morning I started for Checkshill, started, I remember,
in a curiously hopeful state of mind, oblivious of comets, strikes,
and wars.

You must understand that I had no set plan of murder when I walked
over to Checkshill. I had no set plan of any sort. There was a
great confusion of dramatically conceived intentions in my head,
scenes of threatening and denunciation and terror, but I did not mean
to kill. The revolver was to turn upon my rival my disadvantage
in age and physique. . . .

But that was not it really! The revolver!—I took the revolver
because I had the revolver and was a foolish young lout. It was a
dramatic sort of thing to take. I had, I say, no plan at all.

Ever and again during that second trudge to Checkshill I was
irradiated with a novel unreasonable hope. I had awakened in the
morning with the hope, it may have been the last unfaded trail of
some obliterated dream, that after all Nettie might relent toward me,
that her heart was kind toward me in spite of all that I imagined
had happened. I even thought it possible that I might have misinterpreted
what I had seen. Perhaps she would explain everything. My revolver
was in my pocket for all that.

I limped at the outset, but after the second mile my ankle warmed
to forgetfulness, and the rest of the way I walked well. Suppose,
after all, I was wrong?

I was still debating that, as I came through the park. By the corner
of the paddock near the keeper's cottage, I was reminded by some
belated blue hyacinths of a time when I and Nettie had gathered
them together. It seemed impossible that we could really have parted
ourselves for good and all. A wave of tenderness flowed over me,
and still flooded me as I came through the little dell and drew
towards the hollies. But there the sweet Nettie of my boy's love
faded, and I thought of the new Nettie of desire and the man I had
come upon in the moonlight, I thought of the narrow, hot purpose
that had grown so strongly out of my springtime freshness, and my
mood darkened to night.

I crossed the beech wood and came towards the gardens with a resolute
and sorrowful heart. When I reached the green door in the garden
wall I was seized for a space with so violent a trembling that I
could not grip the latch to lift it, for I no longer had any doubt
how this would end. That trembling was succeeded by a feeling
of cold, and whiteness, and self-pity. I was astonished to find
myself grimacing, to feel my cheeks wet, and thereupon I gave way
completely to a wild passion of weeping. I must take just a little
time before the thing was done. . . . I turned away from the door
and stumbled for a little distance, sobbing loudly, and lay down
out of sight among the bracken, and so presently became calm again.
I lay there some time. I had half a mind to desist, and then my
emotion passed like the shadow of a cloud, and I walked very coolly
into the gardens.

Through the open door of one of the glass houses I saw old Stuart.
He was leaning against the staging, his hands in his pockets, and
so deep in thought he gave no heed to me.

I hesitated and went on towards the cottage, slowly.

Something struck me as unusual about the place, but I could not
tell at first what it was. One of the bedroom windows was open,
and the customary short blind, with its brass upper rail partly
unfastened, drooped obliquely across the vacant space. It looked
negligent and odd, for usually everything about the cottage was
conspicuously trim.

The door was standing wide open, and everything was still. But giving
that usually orderly hall an odd look—it was about half-past two
in the afternoon—was a pile of three dirty plates, with used knives
and forks upon them, on one of the hall chairs.

I went into the hall, looked into either room, and hesitated.